Battleground Art: Revisiting the Culture Wars in Cincinnati

CINCINNATI - IT's hard to imagine a better time or place than this election year and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati to mount the exhibition "Crimes and Misdemeanors: Politics in U.S. Art of the 1980's." What more symbolic venue could there be for a show about yesteryear's culture wars? It was the Contemporary, after all, that was besieged in 1990 when its then director, Dennis Barrie, was hauled into county court for "pandering obscenity" after showing Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs.

Cincinnati remains a conservative redoubt in a battleground state. But the selection of paintings, sculptures, videos and photographs in this show -- on view through Nov. 21 in Zaha Hadid's acclaimed new building -- feels like a brave attempt by a rejuvenated institution to confront its local audience, and perhaps at the same time begin to repair the city's reputation for cultural provincialism.

It is doubly daring that so much of the material is highly sexual and partisan. Planned several years ago, the show cannot be seen as a deliberate rebuke to the obsequies for Ronald Reagan in June, although visitors may be forgiven if that's the impression they come away with. If nothing else, they will be reminded that many artists regarded his presidency as a call to arms. The work in these rooms by Gran Fury, Cary Leibowitz, Robbie Conal, Sue Coe, Barbara Kruger, the Guerrilla Girls and Hans Haacke rails against the government and the American public for everything from official indifference to AIDS and homelessness, to judicial assaults on abortion rights and congressional defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts, to the underrepresentation of women in New York galleries and mindless consumerism. The general tone of sarcasm makes Michael Moore seem deferential and tongue-tied.

The curator, Thom Collins (who has since left to become director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore), has organized the art around four themes: "Having/Not," "Identity/Constructs," "Institutional/Critiques" and "Sex/Kills." This flexible definition of political art allows riddlers like Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Richard Prince, David Hammons, Cindy Sherman and Louise Lawler to share space with fire-breathing activists like Ms. Kruger and Mr. Haacke. There is even room for Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons at the party, although neither dances to mind as an engaged political figure.

The show argues that a thread running through the art of these years, connecting bright young gallery stars to less remunerated figures who demonstrated with Act Up or worked with the homeless, was the shared tactics of conceptual art. The Guerrilla Girls may have taken their art to the streets, slapping their posters about the relative neglect of female artists all over downtown New York, but the mode of their message had much in common with the gender critiques that Mr. Prince and Ms. Sherman hung in tony galleries.

Glenn Ligon's ingenious "Red Portfolio" from 1993 stands out in this crowd. On nine text panels he has printed the Rev. Donald Wildmon's descriptions of Mapplethorpe photographs. One of the texts reads: "A photo showing one man holding another man's genitals"; another says: "A photo of a man with a bullwhip inserted in his rectum."

Rev. Wildmon's irate words, originally written on postcards and sent to supporters and politicians in hopes of inciting a boycott of offending museums, are here coolly redeployed as "art" via the trick of appropriation (that ubiquitous 80's word). This transformation into another medium also highlights the mysterious gulf between graphic images and graphic words. As the reports of torture in Iraq suggest, sex acts assume a special power if photographed and released to the world. What's more, words have an established First Amendment legal protection that photographs have never enjoyed, an issue evident in the Mapplethorpe affair.

Oddly, nowhere does the Contemporary show mention that Mapplethorpe's photographs were once vexing for the institution. But a skittishness about the presentation of sexual matters pervades the show. A sign on a temporary white wall that cuts the first room in half warns the visitor about adult content on the other side. Beyond the barrier are Annie Sprinkle's "Bosom Ballet" (a series of photographs in which the former porn actress manipulates her breasts with hands sheathed in full-length gloves), paintings of nudes by Eric Fischl and David Salle, Nan Goldin's naked portraits of her friend Cookie Mueller, as well as a sculpture by the self-described "super-masochist" Bob Flanagan. (His "Toy Box," constructed with help from his friend Sheree Rose, is a lewd meditation on childhood and war and superheroes.)

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A similar historical silence surrounds the work of Karen Finley and Tim Miller. Rather than re-examine their performance pieces, which were highly controversial at the time -- along with Holly Hughes and John Fleck they formed the "N.E.A. Four," whose grants were revoked in 1990 because of explicit sexual content -- Mr. Collins has all but buried them. The videos of Ms. Finley and Mr. Miller are displayed on a tiny monitor tucked beneath the stairway; unless a viewer stumbles upon them, hits the power button and dons the headphones, the screen is blank.

Time and circumstance have blunted certain once-pointed works. Hans Haacke's "Helmsboro Country" consists of a large wooden pack of faux Marlboros, with cardboard cigarettes spilling out of the top. Excerpts from the Bill of Rights are printed on the wrapping papers. Mr. Haacke's target is Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator, a scourge of liberals for decades and a longtime ally of tobacco companies.

But Senator Helms is retired and Mr. Haacke's cynicism has been trumped by reality. Philip Morris has morphed into another company, the harmless-sounding Altria, which now runs ads against smoking; and money from the 1998 tobacco company settlements with 46 states pays for roads and schools. Mr. Haacke's outrage over Philip Morris's sponsorship of art and civic events as a ploy to divert attention from the business of selling cigarettes has to be explained to a 2004 audience. Political art that would benefit from a half-dozen footnotes no longer serves its original purpose: to deliver an immediate shock to the system.

Perhaps a show built around these still-contentious issues can't be called successful without protesters on the sidewalk or museum officials on trial. It may take another 20 years before the period can be assessed without fear of lawsuits. Today artists have expressed their political views more immediately on the Internet and in street demonstrations, but not as pungently on the walls of galleries. Visitors to this show who were not conscious of events in the 80's may leave thinking that even though American troops were not overseas fighting in a divisive war, the temperature of art during that period burned much hotter.

The recent appointment of Linda Shearer as the director of the Contemporary seems to signal that the board would like a strong leader. A curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 80's and most recently director of the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass., she has gravitated toward art with political themes, organizing well-received shows by Carrie Mae Weems, Kiki Smith and Kara Walker and on Hitler's youth as a painter.

Perhaps under her tenure more pointed questions can be asked about those who make so-called confrontational art. It would be salutary to determine in what ways, if any, Mapplethorpe or Mr. Koons should be considered political artists and to what extent those artists in the 80's who claimed to be mocking American consumerism have themselves been happily consumed.